This is interesting... it seems that DirectGov are opening up their various information feeds so that developers and nerds can mash 'em up into new stuff.

This is a fascinating (and I have to say, far-sighted and laudable) ambition. Pretty radical for Gordon Brown, too, given his traditional lack of anything approaching openness.

I can imagine some very interesting ideas, but I wonder how much of this will be constrained by the format of content and the metadata attached to it. I'm not familiar enough with the kind of information and data that DirectGov might churn out, but I intend to start looking more closely.

It would be good to apply some proper user-centred innovation to this, rather than leaving it only to the geeks. (Not that UCD people ain't geeks, but hey...)

Any ideas?

UPDATE: Apparently this was launched st BarCamp. Good on 'em, they pretty much threw it out there and said damn the consequences... Apparently Tom Watson, the minister who is in chrage of Transformational Government thought it was great. He heartily approved of the mash-up solutions that various taleted geeks created to show which schools were closed during the snow day.